Why Titanic sank

There is no "one" real reason.

 

The germans knew the cause of the Hindenburg fire. For the NEXT airship, the Graf Zeppelin II, they replaced the powdered aluminum in the skin doping (ROCKET FUEL) with powdered bronze.

 

Well, yeah - there is. More water got into the hull than the remaining flotation could support.

The multiple events that allowed that to happen, and that made it so devastating, start before the design was completed.

 

TL;DR - storms a-coming, we are due for a modern day "Titanic" disaster.

Major transport accidents across all the modes (air, land, and sea) tend to have similar origins, and a similar evolution of safety systems.

The accident starts with new technology which leads to some kind of growth/change in the sector. There’s some smallish accidents which catalyse the recognition for improved safety systems. The safety systems and understanding of the technology eventually stabilise in growth and equilibrium is more-or-less established between profit and acceptable casualties.

Meanwhile the technology is morphing and combining with other tech and growth quietly continues to produce increasingly bigger and more complex machines. Eventually a perfect storm is brewing, where industry is confident they understand how it all works, and the safety systems ( STCW, ISM, classification etc) have grown to be big and complex as well (which seems to give people confidence in them).

Unfortunately international safety systems carry so much inertia they are glacial slow to meet new challenges (and when agreement is reached it will be to the lowest common standard). Eventually the machines don’t quite fit the safety systems in place to protect them.

It seems that we may be due for a major correction in the mega-cruise ship sector, the warning bells are ringing (to my paranoid ears anyway) – the ships are bigger and significantly more complex than ever, there’s more of them, and the public and industry are totally confident in safety of modern shipping.

There’s been a few large cruise ships come to grief recently, and in the process they have demonstrated inadequate safety systems (but with few casualties, so they can’t be that bad, right?). Tweak a couple of variables and the outcomes are quite different...

The step change in safety initiated by the Titanic was possibly due to the shock of many dead in one high profile accident as opposed to the same number of dead across several previous accidents. I’m not suggesting safety on ships has not improved a great deal, I’m more suggesting that we are due for a big kick in the pants.

mm, sorry, turns out that was a bit more ranting than I intended...

 

I concur RT, and individuals sense of personal responsibility slowly erodes during the process.

Ain't progress magnificent!

Stay alert, and don't ever rely on insurance.

 

So why doesn't a metal roof coated with aluminium paint explode or catch fire from a lightning strike ? I have actually witnessed such a strike (dry). I doubt hydrogen needs any encouragement to burn ! I think the latest thinking on the Hindenburg is that is was leaking hydrogen in substantial quantities just prior to it'd demise, as witnessed by the crew being unable to trim it level, fore and aft. A little static electricity did the rest.

 

Yeah, it should be Olympic II.

 

Is calling it Titanic II a mistake from a commercial point of view ? You'd hardly think so, it has immediate recognition. Is it a mistake in the "bad luck" sense ? I suppose only time will tell !

 

They have to rely on getting consumers, that is customers, willing to pay the money to go for a ride on it. It may be irrational, but you NEVER want to do anything that would make even a small percent of your customers to book on another ship. this seems obvious, there are just too many that see a name like Titanic as associated with too famous a disaster, it is far too public a name, acting careers have been built the moves about it alone. It has nothing to do with your customers being rational about it, it has to do with publicity.

There is not a single major airline builder that would ever use an alternative aircraft configuration for the same reason. Airline customers have become used to the conventional wing/fuselage/tail configuration, and still, too many are fearful of flying anyway even in familiar looking aircraft (that is btw, why each new aircraft design looks a lot like the last one). There are many cost/operational advantages to a tailless (all wing) or tail first (canard) design for a long range transport, but not a single manufacturer or airline are willing to give it a try.

Consumer fears are just way too fickle, if something as simple as a name will cause you to lose 2-3 percent of your customers, they will NOT do it. Naming a cruise ship Titanic is a huge mistake, unless for what ever reason they are willing to invest really big money on a "nostalgia" gamble.

 

Never mind the name.

Is it even a good idea to build it?

 

Maybe it would be better with another name, such as the Andrea Doria or the Lusitania.

 

Or maybe the SS Minnow?

 

Yeah, that could be a kipper!



I mean keeper.

 

Clive Palmer is an eccentric. So far his eccentricities have proven no bar to money-making, chances are his instincts are not far wrong that this will be a money-maker. I doubt it'd be happening without the success of the movie of a few years back, and I really don't think people will be spooked by the historical fate of the original, in most cases.

 

could full reverse have sucked water out and used dynamic pressure to keep the bow from dropping? along with stern ballasting?


Couldn't that fat laden Edwardian cuisine and all those heavy curtain, and empty wine bottles, etc been used to fashion corcales? Seas were very calm. All it would have had to do is kept most of the water out.

Tip a big table over onto an even bigger theater curtain that had been greased, and stack and tie a bunch of chairs to fill the center to make a frameworks, tie curtain to top of chairs.

Didn't Paul Newman escape from Devil's Island on sack of coconuts in a tarp, and that was through surf! Warm surf, but still surf.